My favourite philosophical disproofs of God’s existence

Many atheist philosophers have taken an “armchair approach” to disproving God’s existence by arguing that his traditional core attributes are self contradictory: they are like a square circle.

Omnipotence –v- omniscience

One of the key disproofs is the apparent contradiction between God being omnipotent and omniscient.  If God is omniscient (everywhere in space and time) then he knows the future down to the last micro-detail.  But if he is omnipotent (all powerful) as well, then he can interfere with events in space and time in the form of miracles, which make his initial choices fallacious.  Mathematician John Allen Paulo’s gem of a book, Irreligion, summarises the contradiction very well:

If one assumes that God is both omnipotent and omniscient, an obvious contradiction arises.  Being omniscient, God knows how everything will happen; He can predict the future trajectory of every snow flake, the spouting of every blade of grass, and the deeds of every human being, as well as all of His own actions.  But being omnipotent, He can act in any way and do any thing He wants, including behaving in ways different from those he predicted, making his expectations uncertain and fallible.  He thus cannot be both omnipotent and omniscient.

As does Karen Owens’ limerick:

Can the omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?

Perfect being –v- Creator of the Universe

However, my all time favourite disproof was aired by physicist Victor Stenger at the start of his first debate against Christian apologist William Lane Craig at the University of Hawaii in 2003:

Perfect –v- Creator

If God is perfect, then he has no needs or wants.  This is incompatible with the notion that God created the Universe for some divine purpose.  Divine purpose implies that God wants something he doesn’t already have, which makes him imperfect.

In his rebuttal, Craig moaned that Stenger had not stated the philosophical premises for this argument, however, atheist philosopher Theodore M Drange states them rather well:

1. If God exists, then he is perfect.
2. If God exists, then he is the creator of the Universe.
3. A perfect being can have no needs or wants.
4. If any being created the universe, then he must have had some need or want.
5. Therefore, it is impossible for a perfect being to be the creator of the universe (from 3 and 4).
6. Hence, it is impossible for God to exist (from 1, 2, and 5)

To borrow Douglas Adams’ words in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (albeit in relation to the amazing properties of the Babel Fish, but no less relevant to the matters presently at hand), “‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.”

During his rebuttal in the Stenger debate and in this article on his website, Craig has argued that God did not created the Universe to satisfy any needs or wants of his own, but to benefit the objects of his creations so that they can enjoy a personal relationship with him.

To which Sam Harris has replied (sarcastically), “Lucky us…”

New biopic on Charles Darwin fails to find a distributor in religious America

manicstreetpreacher reports on how creationist lunacy is still very alive and well in the Land of the Free.

I was stunned when I came across this article in on The Daily Telegraph website a few days ago about the soon-to-be-released biopic of the author of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, Creation (homepage / IMDB), directed by Jon Amiel and starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly.

The film, which is due to be released in the UK on 25 September 2009, appears to have been warmly received by critics in Europe.  Richard Dawkins, who has recently published his defence of the evidence for evolution, The Greatest Show On Earth, sat on a Newsnight Review panel with other religious and atheist intellectuals, praised the film overall with a few reservations in regard to “storytelling licence” over Darwin’s tortured character and the pressure he received from T H Huxley as portrayed in the film.

The film has been eagerly snapped up by film distributors from Europe to Australia, however, The Daily Telegraph reports that it has failed to find one in the USA due to anti-Darwin sentiments which are still rife over 150 years after the books was published.

The article ramifies the unbelievable ignorance and bigotry on display in a country where only 39% of population actually believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment dismissing evolution as “a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying”.

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published:

That’s what we’re up against.  In 2009.  It’s amazing.

The film has no distributor in America.  It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about.  People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.

It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America.  There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days.  It’s quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America.  We live in a country which is no longer so religious.  But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.

Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn’t saying ‘kill all religion’, he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people.

Movieguide.org, an influential website which reviews films from a Christian perspective, recently reviewed a book called Darwin’s Racists by Sharon Sebastian and Raymond G Bohlin and described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”.  His “half-baked theory” directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”, the site stated.

I have refuted at length these prejudices relating to Darwin’s theory here and here on this blog, so I am not going to expend the energy in doing so again in this article.  There would be little point. If I haven’t convinced anyone by now, then I’m not going to.

I just think that it is incredibly worrying that in the 21^st century over half the population of the most affluent country in the world are so blinded by their religious dogmas that they fail to recognise the beauty, simplicity and above all the truth of a theory that has directly lead to advances in science and medicine of the kind that have eradicated smallpox from the globe.

Are Americans really so uncomfortable with the thought of being related to a monkey?  Yet again, John Allen Paulos in Irreligion puts matters into their proper perspective when he asks which is worse; having evolved from a puddle of slime over billions of years as Darwin’s ideas have us, or the Genesis account of being created from a lump of dirt…